Goodreads, that social network for the bookish, recently posted on its blog the results of a survey taken among its 20 million members with the melancholy title “The Psychology of Abandonment.” Complete with infographic, the survey gives us, among other things, a list of the “Top Five Abandoned Classics.” James Joyce’s Ulysses is third on the list, and I’m not at all surprised to find it there. One must know Ulysses, it seems, to merit consideration as a culturally literate person. But Ulysses, perhaps more than any work of modern literature, can easily discourage. It presents us with a landscape so psychologically complex, so dense with literary and historical allusion and contemporary cultural reference, that I cannot say I would have known what to do with it had I not read it under the auspices of an august Irish Joyce scholar and with Don Gifford’s guidebook Ulysses Annotated ready at hand. I had nowhere near the breadth and depth of reading Joyce seems to assume of his ideal reader. Few people do.

Two of Joyce’s contemporaries, however, had such a grasp of literature and language: T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. And the two had quite a lot to say about the book, much of it to each other. Eliot recommended Joyce’s novel to Woolf, and very soon after its 1922 publication, she purchased her own copy. At the time, Woolf was hard at work on her story “Mrs. Dalloway on Bond Street,” which would eventually grow into her next novel, Mrs. Dalloway. She was also immersed in Proust’s epic Remembrance of Things Past, just beginning the second volume. According to Dartmouth’s James Heffernan, Woolf “chafes at the thought of Ulysses,” writing haughtily:

Oh what a bore about Joyce! Just as I was devoting myself to Proust—Now I must put aside Proust—and what I suspect is that Joyce is one of those undelivered geniuses, whom one can’t neglect, or silence their groans, but must help them out, at considerable pains to oneself.

Heffernan chronicles Woolf’s reading of Ulysses, which she documented in her diary in a “withering assessment” as the work of “a self-taught working man… egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating.” “When one can have cooked flesh,” she writes, “why have the raw?”

This private critical opinion Woolf recorded after reading only 200 pages of the novel. Heffernan makes the case that she read no more thereafter. Though she claimed to have “finished Ulysses,” he takes her to mean she had finished with the book, putting it aside like those bewildered, bored, or exasperated Goodreads members. Nevertheless, Woolf could not shake Joyce. She continued to write about him, to Eliot and herself. “Never did any book so bore me,” she would write, and many more very disparaging remarks about her brilliant contemporary.

Over and again she savaged Joyce in her diaries; so much so that it seems to Heffernan and Woolf scholar Suzette Henke that hers is a case of protesting too much against an author whom, Henke alleges, was her “artistic ‘double,’ a male ally in the modernist battle for psychological realism.” This may indeed be so. In the midst of her characterizations of Joyce as uncouth, boring, “underbred” and worse, she admits in her diary that what she attempted in her fiction was “probably being better done by Mr. Joyce.” While hardly any reader of Ulysses—among those who finish it and those who don’t—can say they are attempting something near what he accomplished, we might all find some solace in knowing that a reader as sharp as Virginia Woolf found his modernist masterpiece either so boring or so intimidating that even she may not have been able to finish it.

Comments (7)

I’ve read Ulysses 3 times & consider it to be one of the 2 or 3 greatest novels ever written. In contrast, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway & To The Lighthouse were insipid grad school reading chores that I barely recall anything about 15 years later. In all fairness to her, however, Ulysses is a very difficult book without supplementary materials — the plot summary by Blamires is practically indispensable.

I think I would go the “protests too much” route here. A major chunk of _Dalloway_ reads like the “Wandering Rocks” episode in _Ulysses_. I’m certainly not accusing Woolf of plagiarism, but nastiness towards Joyce could indicate defensiveness over the clear similarity.

In his excellent and recommendable book “Old Masters and Young Geniuses”, David Galenson makes the case that the reason Wool got “puzzled, bored, irritated & disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his dimples” when reading Ulysses, was that she were an experimental artist, and Joyce an conceptual one. Two, in Galenson’s opinion, incompatible views on art.nnHis idea in short:nnhttp://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/interview-galenson.html?c=y&page=1

In my VERY humble opinion, Ulysses is one of that range of books that can only be claimed as ‘enjoyable’ by intellectuals. Define the word as you will.nMy own definition has me well on the outer: having read excerpts, I wouldn’t even pick it up.nI like my reading to challenge me, yes (although not always): but there are challenges and there are confrontations. I honestly don’t see how a person of normal intelligence, or even above, can get through Ulysses and claim to have comprehended it.

Her books will be (and basically are being) used as doorstops, while every scrap of paper that Joyce used to wipe his ass is saved as a relic. In a hundred years nobody will even care who she was, and basically thatu00b4s the real definition of poetic justice.

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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.